Remember Apple’s vision pro? These are 3,499 mixed reality headsets that the company founded in early 2024, but failed to gain public interest. Over the past year, Apple has updated the platform and will soon be upgraded to a new version: Visionos 26.
I had the opportunity to try some new features, but two people were more attractive to me than the others. First, the upgrade of the character. This is the space avatar that the headset creates based on the similarity you use the onboard camera. (You have to point your headphones to the head and create the character through the setup process.) The first thing I heard when I joined a Zoom meeting in a Vision Pro last year was laughter. My character is stiff and my hair looks dumb Bad.
Apple has revamped the look and feel to make these 3D digital representations better than before and have a more natural and realistic design. You can even see the entire side view of the head. The hair texture and skin tone are better. I set up my character without wearing glasses, but was able to add virtual glasses in the same style as my actual frame and they weren’t clamped or looked weird. (I recorded some greetings through a third-party app, which you can see below.)
Don’t get me wrong, there are still some incredible valleys happening here – facial expressions and eye movements are very rigid – but better than the leap and boundaries that debuted on Vision Pro last year. You can use these characters for video calls, or when someone joins the virtual space remotely.
Another notable new feature in the OS update is the widget. You can place widgets such as clock, calendar, or music widgets around the house and they will always stay in the same place. Apple implements this by creating a house map that is privately stored on your AVP device. Even if you restart it and browse again, the headset remembers the location of the widget.
I walked from room to room, wearing visual professional headphones, and saw wide widgets placed around the room. The list of placeable widgets includes a digital photo frame, just like a window in a virtual space; you can see more photos as you get close to it.
It’s a neat idea – every time you put on your headphones, you can have a virtual living space or a wide variety of living spaces and PIN applications in a specific place in the room, as well as virtual calendars, clocks, music playback widgets and more. You can pin Safari to your home office and walk to the bedroom and pin the Apple TV. The entire virtual space can be prepared just like your physical residence.
Strangely, Apple wants you to wear headphones and walk around the house, interact with space widgets, and talk to a digital version of your face, how comfortable it is.
When Vision Pro debuted, Apple was ridiculed as his two children played a father’s clip in front of him, which captured a video of space with headphones. My wife hates it whenever I wear headphones. But Apple hasn’t changed its position – it wants you to live in Visionos, even if you end up looking like Wade Watts Prepared player one.
